Paper by Brenda Moon, Nicolas Suzor & Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Berlin, 6 Oct. 2016.

1. BEYOND HASHTAGS: COLLECTING AND
ANALYSING CONVERSATIONS ON TWITTER
Brenda Moon, Nicolas Suzor & Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández
Digital Media Research Centre
Queensland University of Technology

2. Previous research
• Twitter
– Keywords/hashtags (Rambukkana, 2015; Bruns & Burgess,
2015)
•Network analysis
•Content analysis
– Approaching completeness (Lorentzen & Nolin, 2015)
• We want to catch more of the conversation

3. Methodology
• Rationale
– Computational analysis (quantitative) + Ethnography /
Visualisation / observation/ description (Qualitative)
• What are these extra tweets telling us?
– Where is the conversation happening? (reply-chains)
– Can we discover new themes? (hashtags)
– Can we discover new actors? (@mentions)
Are they relevant to the issue/controversy/event we are
examining?

4. Data collection & Uber as a case study
Seed
tweet
in_reply_to
tweet_id
in_reply_to
tweet_id
follow reply chain
back in time using
‘in_reply_to’ field
which contains
the tweet_id of
the replied to
tweet
searching for
tweet_id in
‘in_reply_to’ field

5. Timeline of Uber Tweets
Case Study:
New Year 2015

6. New Years Eve 2015 - price surge controversy
Seed Supplement
% of
total
1. Tweets 256,682 53,111 17.1
2. Retweets 84,502 142 0.2
3. Tweeting users 70,584 3,379 4.6
4. Replied to users (by to_user_id) 21,113 6,470 23.5
5a. Replies (by to_user_id) 42,143 46,449 52.4
6a. Mentioned users including RTs 57,151 5,396 8.6
6b. Mentioned users excluding RTs 33,667 6,194 15.5
7a. Mentioned users who sent tweets 9,587 5,099 34.7
7b. Mentioned users who didn't send any tweets 47,564 297 0.6
8. Hashtags (unique hashtags) 21,338 1,773 7.7

7. New Years Eve 2015 - network metrics - mention
network
Seed Supp % of total contributed
by Supplement
1. Nodes 2,276.00 312 12.06
2. Edges 2,527.00 713 22.01
3. Average weighted degree 2.22 0.28 11.31
4. Max in-degree 295 0 0
5. Max out-degree 27 12 30.77
6. Average path length 2.9 2.36 44.89

8. Reply chains: conversation network
nodes: 2,345
extra tweets: 70%
seed tweets: 30%

9. Reply chains: selected chain
nodes: 2,345
extra tweets: 70%
seed tweets: 30%

10. Original Tweet:
Some of the replies in
the reply chain:

11. @mentions
@Bencubby

12. Hashtags

13. Preliminary Conclusions
• Importance of qualitative observation and
exploration to make sense of complex conversations
on social media
• The method is more useful to identify conversations
and understand context rather than discover new
themes via hashtags (e.g. central issues vs
annotations)
• Visualization helps identify points of interest

14. Future outlook
• Additional case studies to identify which types of
events reply chain supplementation is useful for.
• Identifying ‘key media objects’
(e.g. highly posted images, videos, or arguments)
and tracing the conversation specifically around
them, rather than our keyword datasets.
•Evolution over time - looking at how these
conversations evolve and change over time

15. Thank you :)
Brenda Moon @brendam
Nicolas Suzor @nicsuzor
Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández @andairamf
Digital Media Research Centre
Queensland University of Technology